Daimler to Pull the Plug on Maybach Brand

During the past decade or so, many carmakers have looked into their past to shape their future: the BMW Group's new Mini, the Fiat Group's 500 and the Volkswagen Group's Beetle are among the most well-known examples. But as Mercedes-Benz found out the hard way, not all second comings prove successful.

And now, only a decade after resuscitating Maybach, Daimler is ready to accept defeat and stop producing the $350,000 luxury limousine when the next generation of the Mercedes-Benz S-Class hits the market in 2013.

“It would not make sense to develop a successor model”, Daimler Dieter Zetsche said in an interview with German daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. “The coming S-Class is in such a way a superior vehicle that it can replace the Maybach.”

Mercedes searched deep into its drawers and resurrected the 1930’s-era Maybach brand in an attempt to compete with ultra-luxury rivals such as the VW Group's Bentley and the BMW Group's Rolls-Royce companies.

It displayed a concept of a luxury sedan at the 1997 Tokyo Motor Show, and five years later launched two versions of the same car, the Maybach 57 and 62. Initial estimates called for around 2,000 annual sales, with the U.S. accounting for half of them.

Well, they were almost spot on concerning the 1,000 U.S. sales projections, as the brand recorded a total of 1,112 deliveries. The only problem is that these were not the Maybach’s annual U.S. sales, but rather its total sales from 2003 until 2010.

Considering that in 2004, Maybach's best year, it sold only 244 cars in the U.S., Daimler’s decision to shut down the brand in 2013 and concentrate on Mercedes-Benz’s flagship S-Class didn’t come a moment too soon.

Having lost the market share lead in the luxury segment to BMW since 2005 and dropping to third place behind Audi this year didn’t help the loss-making Maybach’s chances of survival, either, while last year's talks about a possible hook-up with Aston Martin were fruitless.

Despite the Maybach failure, Zetsche told Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung that Mercedes-Benz is readying itself for a comeback: “Mercedes is now mounting the attack in the high-end segment. We have always dominated this segment and that should continue to be the case. We don’t want to wait until the others pull ahead.”